Unfortunately, the first NRC article does itself no favours by using non-comparable x-axis scales for its charts and not really explaining very well how the different datasets (IDL and GRG) were used. Data nerds everywhere then, are wondering whether to repeat the analysis themselves and perhaps fire off a letter to Nature.

I recently saw a tweet floating by which included a link to some recent statistics from PubMed Commons, the NCBI service for commenting on scientific articles in PubMed. Perhaps it was this post at their blog. So I thought now would be a good time to write some code to analyse PubMed Commons data.

Well, here we are again in 2016 with Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature. This study examined 35 175 supplementary Excel data files from 3 597 published articles. Simple yet clever, isn’t it. I bet you wish you’d thought of doing that. I do. The conclusion: about 20% of the articles have associated data files in which gene names have been corrupted by Excel.

We tell you not to use Excel. You counter with a host of reasons why you have to use Excel. None of them are good reasons. I don’t know what else to say. Except to reiterate that probably 80% or more of the data analyst’s time is spent on data cleaning and a good proportion of the dirt arises from avoidable errors.

Just a short note to alert you to a publication with my name on it. Great work by lead author and former colleague Aidan; I just did “the Gephi stuff”. If you’re interested in bioinformatics applications of Apache Spark, take a look at:

“Novel” findings, as judged by the usage of that word in titles and abstracts really have undergone a startling increase since about 1975. Indeed, almost 7.2% of findings were “novel” in 2014, compared with 3.2% for the period 1845 – 2014. That said, if we plot using a log scale as suggested by Tal on the original post, the rate of usage appears to be slowing down. See image, right (click for larger version).

PeerJ, like PLoS ONE, aims to publish work on the basis of “soundness” (scientific and methodological) as opposed to subjective notions of impact, interest or significance. I’d argue that effective, appropriate data visualisation is a good measure of methodology. I’d also argue that on that basis, Evolution of a research field – a micro (RNA) example fails the soundness test.Continue reading →

I’ve had a half-formed, but not very interesting blog post in my head for some months now. It’s about a conversation I had with a PhD student, around 10 years ago, after she went to a bioinformatics talk titled “Excel is not a database” and how she laughed as I’d been telling her that “for years already”. That’s basically the post so as I say, not that interesting, except as an illustration that we’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time (and little has changed).

HEp-2 or not HEp2?

Anyway, we have something better. I was exploring PubMed Commons, which is becoming a very good resource. The top-featured comment looks very interesting (see image, right).

The sad thing is that this looks like very useful, interesting information which I’m sure would be used widely if presented in an appropriate (open) format and better-publicised. Please, biological science, stop embarrassing yourself. If you don’t know how to do data properly, talk to someone who does.